suda

When we headed to Covent Garden, we weren't planning on eating out. So when we got a little caught up in the buzz of the place and heard our stomachs grumbling, we were more than a little unprepared for the craziness that is a Saturday night in London town. All the good restaurants had long queues spilling out onto the street - what were we to do?

We had both been to a good Thai place right by Jamie's and Cantina Laredo before, and knowing it has lots of seating across two floors, we headed in to try our luck. Thank goodness, we were quite early so bagged ourselves a table upstairs.

We do love our Thai food, as evidenced by the many appearances of Thai curry on the blog. While E stuck to the classic Green Chicken Curry (can't blame him, it's my favourite too), I decided to branch out a little and got the Sea Bass with red curry sauce.

We also shared these summer rolls (probably not called that in Thai cuisine, but no matter) filled with veg and beef.

E is a good sport and has learnt not to complain much when I whip out the camera at any given moment!

Our mains were great. I loved the fish, although sliiiightly overcooked (but I'm very fussy with fish), the coconut rice more than made up for it, as did the sauce. E devoured his curry and we were both very happy campers.

If you're stuck in the area on a busy night and looking for somewhere good without a 45 minute wait, I would suggest this place as they have a lot of seating, and a little more tucked in that people notice it less! I can attest to the deliciousness of their Pad Thai too, we both had it before and loved it. And no one dislikes Pad Thai, I'm quite sure.

thai green chicken curry

For a Saturday dinner with friends one weekend ago, I decided to make a ginormous batch of Thai green chicken curry. Last time I did prawn, but this time I stuck to the classic and used chicken.

I pretty much just winged it - I wanted lots of leftovers, so I used an entire jar of Thai green curry paste (sorry, I couldn't face the hassle of homemade!), 3 cans of coconut milk, 4 aubergines, a bag of green beans, and over a kilo of chicken thighs. And a mountain of rice.

I chopped everything up, stir fried the veg, added chicken, and flavoured the coconut milk with lots of coriander, lemongrass, lime juice and fish sauce.

Brought to a boil, and simmered on low heat for about 45 minutes. I wanted everything to be melt in your mouth delicious.

Served with a simple salad with an Asian dressing (sesame oil, lime juice, white wine vinegar & fish sauce) and jasmine rice.

I would say it turned out quite well - I'm no expert when it comes to Thai cooking, but I love the ease of it and the fresh flavours are good any time of the year.

As for dessert - C had prepared the world's most delicious Tiramisu!

What with this and her spectacular gifts, she's going to be in my good books for a long time.

We burnt off the sugar (or some of it, at least) with Absolute Balderdash.

It's a fantastic game to play with your family and friends - we love it, alongside our favourite Taboo.

Do you have any recommendations for another fun game to add to our growing collection? We aren't ones to stay out late clubbing or doing anything remotely wild, but give us a good old board game and we can stay up 'til the crack of dawn laughing our heads off.

Green Prawn Curry

After the delicious curry at Busaba, I was hit by a craving for it just a few days later. That's the mark of a good dish.

So back at home, I decided to try my hand at a green curry, this time with prawns & lots and lots of veg. As a somewhat obvious disclaimer, I don't claim for a second that this is brilliantly authentic or done "correctly" - it was just a bit of homemade culinary fun!

I used a simple jar of green curry paste from Tesco, but I'm sure that you could get even better quality pastes from asian markets. Oh, and before you get started on the curry, don't forget to cook your lovely jasmine rice.

When I make slightly healthier versions of dishes, I do sometimes like to use the "light" versions of ingredients. However, most of the time I would rather not, and find that it's easiest to use extra vegetables to increase the healthy factor without losing any flavour. 

For my curry, I used a big aubergine and lots of baby corn and snap peas to bulk it up. I also added some lemongrass, which is amazing for thai dishes.

As for the cooking, I stir fried about 5 TBSP of the curry paste with 1 TBSP of vegetable oil, and added the lemongrass as it started smelling good.

I then emptied the 400ml can of coconut milk, and brought it to a boil. After reducing the heat, I added all the vegetables and let it simmer for 5-10mins.

Halfway through, I added a couple of tablespoons of fish sauce, essential for this dish in my opinion. I added the prawns near the end, as they really only need to be cooked for a couple of minutes.

And that's it! Topped with some coriander and served with warm rice.

And lest you think that I do all the cooking around here, that's not quite true. Luckily, E is a great cook, and more importantly, a very enthusiastic one. He's more of a pinch of this, dash of that cook and rarely uses recipes, and he is especially good at fancy French cooking. 

The following day for dinner though, he whipped up a simple pasta with the leftover prawns in a vodka, lemon & garlic sauce. 

I just didn't want bad karma for not giving him his share of cooking credit!

p.s. completely unrelated, but I am so proud and excited that Tokyo won the bid for the 2020 Olympics Games!! I am a huge Olympics fanatic and I couldn't be happier. I'm just trying to not think about how old I will be then... (cough32cough)